Gorgeous Pictures, Little Else

MINIMALIST ON ALL BUT the visual count, Nostalghia offers two hours of strikingly beautiful scenery, laced with exotic-looking characters and outbursts of Russian poetry. The film out stylizes every one in recent memory--at the expense, however, of plot, character, dialogue, and other such standard fare; emerging instead is a scenic tour of Tuscany and of the director's subconscious.

The cast--and dialogue--are international enough to put Cafe Pamplona to shame. Oleg Yankovsky plays a Russian poet named Gortchakov, who is in Italy to write a book about a 17th-century composer, Gortchakov is accompanied by an interpreter, Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano). Like Fellini, another comsummate stylist, Tarkovsky seems to have chosen his cast primarily for their visual qualities--particularly Giordano, who has the Surrealist-Madonna looks to complement the Surrealist-pastoral scenery forming the backbone of this film.

Gortchakov and Eugenia travel around the southern Italian countryside, presumably to research the biography the poet is writing. Throughout, there is an erotic tension between the two. Nothing, however, happens--everything remains at the stage where emotions are present as suggestions and undertones, never as catalysts to action.

Nostalghia as a whole consists of suggestions, images, and symbols, rather than direct action or dialogue. The images cluster around different kinds of longing of nostalgia--Gortchakov is homesick for Russia; dream-like memory-sequences begin to intrude into the story. Eventually, the subconscious, the memories, unarticulated desires, and dreams all but overwhelm reality, dream-sequences are strung together with a reality that, in turn, is becoming progressively more and more dream-like.

A scene that continually recurs shows the poet's home a small wooden house by a lake, surrounded by birch trees, cattle, and unknown human figures in the eerie twilight of a summer night.

EVEN THE OBVIOUSLY REAL scenes take on a dream-like quality. At the beginning, Eugenia visits a small chapel, a shrine to the Madonna of Childbirth. The chapel is half-dark, with ancient rows of pillars lit by hundreds of fluttering candles. All about, black clad women are performing the rituals of worship. Eugenia finds that she cannot bring herself to kneel, and asks the sacristan why only women are worshipping. He tells her that child-bearing and the church are their business; she says nothing in reply. All of a sudden, the air is full of small birds that are flying out of the statue of the Madonna.

In another scene, Gortchakov and Eugenia visit a man who had been mad ever since losing his wife. The madman, who lives in a dilapidated house full of pails and bottles to collect the rain falling through the roof--there is not a single sunny scene in the film--urges Gortchakov to perform a ritual, carrying a lit candle across one of the fountains outside his house--a wish that is later carried out. We know neither the reason for Gortchakov's visit nor the significance of the ritual.

In the final scene, Gortchakov is crossing the fountain carrying a candle, just as the madman is preparing for a self-immolation ceremony atop a Roman sculpture, surrounded by a myriad of oglers and Biblical symbols. Such constant merging of the subconscious and conscious landscapes give the movie a pervasive sense of weirdness, as the scenes are organized around their symbolic and subconscious meanings, rather than a logical scheme. The result is cinematically dazzling, if, at times, difficult to watch because of disjointedness and the fact that very little actually happens.